Welcome to my disorganized wall of text! Please, don't use your time to read this if you don't care or if you also have a minuscule attention span, I just wanted a place to be overly verbose.

First, I am awful at picking favorites for anything, let alone video games. If you put a gun to my head I would probably pick Factorio, but something about that still just doesn't quite feel right. My 'favorites list' is well over 200 and constantly growing. Instead, the game that I have listed as my favorite on my profile is in fact just the game I've been obsessively playing for the past couple hours/days/weeks because I've been hooked on it. I don't really know why I do it, I just get the urge to occasionally update it (except for when I forget to, in which case you can just look at my recently played, if the "favorite" doesn't show up in those top three I probably forgor).

I play a lot of singleplayer games, as well as a few that I play both alone and with friends like Don't Starve (and/or DST) and Valheim, and a couple that technically have a solo option but which more or less demand multiplayer, like Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2.

If I had to choose some go-to genres, they'd probably be:
- cooperative team/class based PvE horde/extraction shooters (good examples are the aforementioned DRG and HD2, Void Crew, and I think I would also put Nightreign here.
- metroidvanias, especially the metroid part god i can't believe Dread is already FOUR years old, I also really want to play Prime 4 but I have no money and hate Nintendo
- immersive sims (a couple favorites in no particular order being the first System Shock (the remake, I'm not brave enough for the OG), Gloomwood, Prey 2017, and Dishonored (RIP Arkane),
- survival base-adaptation (and base-building too, but moreso when you can retrofit an existing location to become a base such as in) games like The Long Dark and Project Zomboid, and even more so if that base (or part of that base, or at least a customizable vehicle or something) gets to move around with you as you explore, à la Subnautica's Cyclops and Seatruck, Raft's... raft, or Pacific Drive's... we'll call it a car. If you know of any other games that do that sort of thing, I don't care if you're a total stranger, please for the love of god message me I hunger for more,
- Boomer shooters (rarely)
- automation and (some) colony-sim games, like Factorio (my beloved), Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld etc. etc. (I'll also say here that while I enjoy most other factory games quite a lot, at heart I'll always be a Factorio girlie)
- some roguelikes, from modern twinstick roguelites like Enter the Gungeon and Nuclear Throne all the way to (still mostly modern) traditional ones with ASCII graphics/tilesets and ♥♥♥♥, like Cogmind and CDDA. It is worth clarifying that there are plenty of games that fit squarely into each label that I just can't quite seem to fully enjoy, such as Hades for the roguelites or Caves of Qud for the tradlikes. Of course, roguelikes have a reputation for being notoriously hard to get into, so there is a good chance that if I bash my head hard enough against any of those games they might click some day, but this genre is far less guaranteed for me than most of the others.
- I don't know if this is even a recognized genre yet, but I'll call them "futuristic-job-sims." Games like Death Stranding (can't wait for the second one to come to Steam), Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and ΔV: Rings of Saturn, where the gameplay loop is basically just menial labor mixed with a little bit of actual thought if you want to be efficient. I think the main appeal has to do with how immersive the settings are, where technology is fantastically advanced but all you really get to do with it in gameplay terms is go to work and/or take orders. They're perfect for when I'm in the mood to quickly swap between mindlessly passing time completing tasks when I don't want to be cognizant and locking the ♥♥♥♥ in when something interesting happens, whether I made it happen or it was just part of the game (things like Mules or BTs in DS, or salvaging a reactor in HS:SB). Plus they trick my stupid idiot brainmeat into giving me all of the neurotransmitters it usually withholds, since it feels like I'm "working" while also relaxing.

Beyond genres, niche, difficult, idiosyncratic small studio/indie games (indiosyncratic games if you will) with rough but interesting gameplay will always take priority for me, and will always top AAA games that are polished but less engaging. Off the top of my head, Duskers, Pacific Drive, and Receiver 2 are just a few of my favorites that I would slot into this category. They're definitely a little scuffed around the edges in various ways, but there's just something about the attitude they have, where it feels like the game itself either doesn't care about you in the slightest, or even better, actively hates you. I enjoy being placed into unforgivingly difficult scenarios where all odds are stacked against me, being forced to figure everything out on my own, making and learning from mistakes while the game happily kicks the ♥♥♥♥ out of me over and over and over until I figure out a way to get ahead of it, conquer it using its own unique mechanics and systems, even if it's just something simple like mastering the funky controls (looking at you Receiver 2, with your 10-step process for reloading) or unique movement or whatever. I have yet to find another feeling so intensely gratifying. Unless a game with that attitude is poorly designed of course, then it is the absolute worst. It takes a lot of finesse to make head-to-wall bashing gameplay punishing but satisfying instead of just immensely frustrating, and you do often need a thick skull anyways. Luckily, I'm already concussed.

I also love (post-)apocalypse or (post-)disaster settings (before, during, after, whenever). Anything from your average scorched-earth post-nuclear weird radioactive hellscape à la S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Fallout (particularly 1 and 2 (and new vegas obviously :3) (and kinda tactics, but that isn't really my game-genre of tea so to speak), that isometric view scratches an itch in my brain and godddddd the bulky look of the power armor, walking tank style, which is like the only thing from the series FO4 got right don't get me started. okay to maybe even decent game, bad Fallout), to zombie outbreaks like the Knox Infection in Project Zomboid and the Harran Virus in Dying Light, to more unique causes like the Sand Plague in Pathologic, the First Flare from The Long Dark, the Mindkill from Receiver, or the titular Death Stranding. It can be the lore of the civilization that came before, the cool technology, the ruined cities & landscapes, the plant and animal (and/or robot) life unique to each game, the total breakdown of societal rules and norms, or whatever else, but they're always my absolute favorite places/times for games to be set in.

(If you don't care for specs, skip this part)
I have a slightly modified prebuilt G5 5000 with a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, 64GB of DRAM (bought for <$100 on a whim only months before the AI bubble decided to ♥♥♥♥ us all yet again), and an i7-10700 (affectionately, The Bottleneck™) as well as a 24" 165 Hz monitor, Razer Ornata keyboard, and a G502 HERO mouse. I've got the default 1TB HDD, a 2TB HDD from an old work computer, and a 2TB NVME SSD that I have finally managed to make into my boot drive after no joke more than two years trying to figure out why it wouldn't let me format it. whoever at microslop programmed "storage spaces" should sleep with one eye open.


you made it all the way to the bottom, bottom! if you think i'm cool (pleaseplsepleasplese) my discord @ is .solark


war
war never changes
but men change

trasgernder